By now, it’s no secret that French economist Thomas Piketty is one of the world’s leading experts on inequality. His exhaustive, improbably popular opus of economic history—the 700-page Capital in the Twenty-First Century—sat atop the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. Some have called it the most important study of inequality in over 50 years.

Piketty is hardly the first scholar to tackle the linkage of capitalism with inequality. What sets him apart is his relentlessly empirical approach to the subject and his access to never before used data—tax and estate records—that elegantly demonstrates the growing trends of income and wealth inequality. The database he has compiled spans 300 years in 20 different countries.

Exactingly empirical and deeply multidisciplinary, Capital is an extremely important contribution to the study of economics and inequality over the last few centuries. But because it fails to address the real limits on growth—namely our ecological crisis—it can’t be a roadmap for the next.

Inequality and Growth

One of the main culprits of inequality, according to Piketty (and Marx before him), is that investing large amounts of capital is more lucrative than investing large amounts of labor.Returns on capital can be thought of as the payments that go to a small fraction of the population—the investor class—simply for having capital.

In essence, the investor class makes money from money, without contributing to the “real economy.” Piketty demonstrates that after adjusting for inflation, the average global rate of return on capital has been steady, at about 5 percent for the last 300 years (with a few exceptions, such as the World War II years).

The rate of economic growth, on the other hand, has shown a different trend. Before the Industrial Revolution, and for most of our human history, economic growth was about 0.1 percent per year. But during and after the rapid industrialization of the global north, growth increased to a then-staggering 1.5 percent in Western Europe and the United States. By the 1950s and 1970s, growth rates began to accelerate in the rest of the world. While the United States hovered just below 2 percent, Africa’s growth rates caught up with America’s, while rates in Europe and Asia reached upwards of 4 percent.

But as Marx observed in the 19th century, economic growth did little to reduce inequality. In fact, as Piketty demonstrates, wealth has grown ever more concentrated in the hands of the few, even as the pie has gotten bigger. Piketty developed a simple formula to illustrate how wealth gets concentrated: when the average rate of return on capital (r) is greater than the rate of economic growth (g)—in mathematical terms, when r > g.

Through the 19th and early 20th centuries, according to Piketty, the rate of return on capital exceeded that of growth, and inequality blossomed in the industrialized world. But in the 1950s, this trend began to shift—not because of redistributive economic policies, but rather as a consequence of historical calamities in the preceding decades. During this time, aggressive social, economic, and tax policies were ushered in by devastation and destruction.

With these policies set in place, the recovery efforts after the Second World War accelerated growth, which for the first time in recent history exceeded the rate of return on capital—that is, g > r—creating a middle-class.

A Mistaken Model

This was the period when economists and policymakers developed a fetish for economic growth, thanks in part to Simon Kuznets, an influential Belarusian-American economist.

Looking at data spanning from 1913 to 1948, Kuznets concluded—mistakenly, according to Piketty—that in the aggregate, economic growth automatically reduces income inequality. Kuznets argued that a rising tide of industrialization would at first create greater inequality as populations were left behind, but once they began to adapt to the new economic conditions, they would eventually gain access to more wealth as they became fully integrated in the new economic model—in essence closing the wealth gap.

It turns out, though, that the rich just keep getting richer.

This misinterpretation helped justify a quest for perpetual economic growth and free markets, paving the way for massive industrialization, accelerated climate change, and widespread environmental destruction, while simultaneously neglecting the very issue Kuznets set out to address: reducing income inequality.

In Capital, Piketty rigorously applies Kuznets’ analysis to a larger dataset and debunks the argument for perpetual growth. Instead, Piketty concludes that industrialization without any enforceable progressive taxation has actually created greater inequality.

Piketty thus forces liberal and conservative economists alike to rethink their models of growth. But if growth isn’t the answer, what is?

The Limits of Growth

Piketty prescribes a few remedies. But he does not take into serious consideration the limits to growth. He is a traditional Keynesian in this regard, which may be his biggest flaw.

His main prescription—a “progressive tax on global capital”—assumes that a 2-5-percent global growth rate is sustainable in the long run and, with a redistribution of capital, will reduce inequality. However, he concedes that a progressive tax on global capital is utopian. So instead, he’ll settle for a “regional or continental tax” as the first step towards a progressive tax on global capital—starting in the European Union.

Piketty’s solutions focus more on taxing egregious levels of wealth concentration than on the systemic conditions that incentivize the desire to accumulate egregious amounts of capital in the first place. He seems to believe that pushing tax rates high enough will deter CEOs from pursuing millionaire salaries, and that this can be done without hindering growth. The first is unlikely, and the second misses the real problem with growth.

Piketty spends about four pages of his 700-page tome talking around the limits to growth, but he fails to adequately address the fact that limitless growth—i.e., consumption—is completely unsustainable on a finite planet. Recent reports from NASA, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and the U.S. government’s National Climate Assessment conclude that the planet cannot continue on the same path of economic growth if it is to sustain human life.

What this means is that it doesn’t matter if we implement a progressive tax on capital because our planet will not sustain forever a growth rate of even 1 percent annually. A dead planet will support neither high earners nor tax collectors.

Towards a New Economy

All this leads to a larger conundrum.

On the one hand, we have extreme inequality, where many live on less than $2 a day while others have so much wealth that it would require several lifetimes to spend. On the other hand, we have a climate crisis that has imposed limits to growth, so we can’t grow our way into shared prosperity.

The traditional approach to inequality is to bring down those at the top while raising up those at the bottom. But to what level should we bring people, considering our finite planet?

Do we want everyone to live a mythical American middle-class lifestyle? Where every family of four lives in a two-car-garage home with a TV in every room, and every family member has a smart phone, tablet, and computer? Where they take a vacation to the other side of the globe once a year, and send their children away to a university and buy them a car when they are of age?

Is this the standard of living we want for every person on the planet? Obviously it can’t be—it would require at least five Earths.

Piketty is right that our political economy favors the growth of inequality, and that inequality in turn poisons our politics. But while we should aspire to create a society that shares its prosperity, we need to address a much bigger gap than the one between rich and poor. We need to address the gap between what’s demanded by our planet and what’s demanded by our economy.

At the center of the rapidly growing New Economy Movement are ecological balance, shared prosperity, and real democracy. If we can’t find a way to build all three, then the only economy worth measuring is the number of days we have left.

Thankfully, the New Economy Movement is seriously considering the four-fold systemic crisis—ecological, economic, social, and political—to identify a just transition to the next system. Piketty can show us part of the problem, but he can’t show us how to solve it on his own.

The 2010 law, “Pay as You Earn,” applied only to those who took out a student loan after October 2007. The new regulations, which will take effect in December 2015, expand the program to those who took out loans prior to October 2007, and allow an estimated 5 million more borrowers to qualify for the lower monthly payments.

The President’s memorandum also outlined executive actions to support federal student loan borrowers who are at risk of defaulting.

Warren’s bill would refinance student loans at a much lower rate, cutting interest payments for many students in half. The bill would pay for the lower interest rates by adopting the Buffet Rule, which raises the marginal tax rate on income in excess of $1 million.

Though the executive order is modest, it signals a move in the right direction. The announcement comes at a key moment as Senator Warren’s bill is expected to be voted on in the Senate as early as Wednesday of this week.

The joint efforts by President Obama and Senator Warren also echo broader concerns about growing inequality. As Senator Warren put it, “Does this country protect millionaires’ and billionaires’ tax loopholes? Or does it try to help young people who are just starting their economic lives?”

Both of these measures are important steps that will relieve millions of student loan borrowers by lowering their monthly payments and interest rates, and protecting them against default. However, solving our student debt crisis in a lasting way will require holding universities accountable for keeping tuition costs down and allocating resources appropriately.

The staggering national student debt of $1.2 trillion has come at a time of rising inequality not only in the United States but also on college campuses. Our research shows that university presidents and administrators are making more money than ever as students go deeper into debt and permanent faculty are replaced with low-wage and temporary ones.

Universities that receive federal dollars should be required to reduce administrative spending and shift resources back to students and the quality of instruction.

Until both lawmakers and universities prioritize reinvesting in America’s young people, the student debt crisis isn’t going anywhere.

President Obama’s West Point graduation speech outlining his foreign policy had some pretty good stuff in it. Leadership doesn’t mean only military force. Just because you have a big hammer doesn’t mean everything is a nail. “A world of greater freedom and tolerance is not only a moral imperative; it also helps keep us safe.” It all sounded great. Just an hour or so later I discussed the speech on Al-Jazeera.

It was a pretty great speech that challenged much of the militarization of post-9/11 U.S. foreign policy—the problem is, like too many great speeches before, it has far too little to do with what the Obama administration actually does.

No question Ben Rhodes is a terrific speechwriter (though don’t get me started on what he doesn’t know as deputy national security adviser,) and Obama knows how to talk the talk. The problem isn’t the speech. The problem is the policy.

Obama was right to criticize the isolationism of “self-described realists” whose interest in the world starts and ends with what is useful for traditionally-defined U.S. interests — that is, mainly military and corporate ones. And he was right to criticize and address the “interventionists from the left and right” who believe that “America’s willingness to apply force around the world is the ultimate safeguard against chaos” — essentially, those who want to use force even more than he does.

But once again Obama didn’t answer his critics — also from the right and left, though most especially from the left — who are outraged at how much he and his administration are using military force, in far too many places, against far too many people, far too often, and far out of public sight.

The mainstream media was full of post-speech carping about Obama setting up a straw man when he accused others of wanting to send ground troops to Syria (or Ukraine, or Nigeria, or Thailand.) The real problem is not that he’s refusing to send ground troops — it’s that he is escalating the military conflicts by involving the U.S. military: providing weapons, supplies, planes and pilots, training, CIA counter-terrorism troops (the CIA now has its own fleet of armed planes, special forces in all but name), and looking for military solutions all over the world.

Obama was right to push back against critics who complain that the U.S. has lost its global leadership role because it hasn’t sent troops everywhere the warmongers wanted. He was right when he said that leadership doesn’t only mean military force. The problem is, though, U.S. leadership and credibility have been dramatically weakened because of too much, not too little military force. The direct U.S. military interventions that failed (Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya); the U.S. search for military solutions even when they claim there are none (Syria); the continuing U.S. reliance on might-makes-right arguments (Guantanamo, the drone war); and the U.S. refusal to get out of the way to let other, more legitimate global institutions lead (Israel-Palestine) have all weakened U.S. global leadership.

Obama’s repeated statement that “there is no military solution” in Syria is belied by the CIA training rebel forces in Jordan, by U.S. allies being allowed to provide U.S.-produced weapons to the rebels, and by apparently imminent efforts to send U.S. shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. If the president believed there is no military solution in Syria, then he should stop supporting one side of this brutal civil war, call for an immediate ceasefire and immediate international arms embargo on all sides, and re-engage with Russia to figure out a diplomatic solution. The current progress in negotiations with Iran should lead to new engagement with Iran on the Syria crisis as well.

When Obama extols American exceptionalism and says, “What makes us exceptional is not our ability to flout international norms and the rule of law; it is our willingness to affirm them through our actions,” he is simply wrong. It is precisely Washington’s ability — and willingness — “to flout international norms and the rule of law” that shows its exceptional military and economic power.

What other country could get away with violating sovereignty by using drone missiles to kill citizens of other countries — within those countries’ borders — because it claims the target of those drone strikes were “bad guys?” What if some other government decided that certain Americans in the U.S. were the bad guys and sent missiles to kill them? Affirming international norms and the rule of law means ending drone strikes and illegal invasions and bombing campaigns, not simply claiming they’re legal because it’s Washington that does it instead of Moscow or Beijing.

The president said he would “continue to push to close Gitmo” because U.S. values and legal traditions “do not permit the indefinite detention of people beyond our borders.” The problem is, that “indefinite detention” is now precisely what defines the values and legal traditions of our country. Like his predecessor, Obama has relied on memos drafted by his own lawyers, without oversight by any court, to reinterpret U.S. law by simply declaring things like assassination of American citizens “legal.” That’s the new American legal tradition.

It’s great to hear that the president describes his most important lesson in foreign affairs being “don’t do stupid shit,” meaning, don’t go to war like we did in Iraq. How does he not recognize, even ignoring the morality of the issue, that killing over 3,000 people by drone strikes in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia — and antagonizing whole populations of restive countries by doing so — qualifies as “stupid shit?” If Congress balks at closing down Guantanamo, it sure sounds pretty stupid not to at least begin to show some leadership by freeing those long-term prisoners already cleared for release.

It’s not completely off-base to say that with Al-Qaeda’s leadership largely decimated, the U.S. (and many other countries) face danger from scattered bands of terrorists across the Middle East, South Asia, and parts of Africa. But what is completely wrong is the notion that somehow going to war can stop terrorism. For any who doubt it, 13 years of responding to the crime of September 11 with a limitless global war has unequivocally proved the point: Terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy, and it’s not possible to conquer terrorism with war. It doesn’t work — it hasn’t worked in Afghanistan (and won’t, with two and a half more years of U.S. war) or in Iraq, and it isn’t working in Yemen, Pakistan, or Somalia either. The U.S. never went to war against “terrorism” — it went to war against the land, people, economy, and environment of the countries it invaded. And still, terrorism has thrived.

President Obama reminded the world that, “As the Syrian civil war spills across borders, the capacity of battle-hardened extremist groups to come after us only increases.” It might have been more powerful if he acknowledged that many of those extremists first gained their battle-hardening experience in Iraq — fighting against the U.S. occupation and its Iraqi partners.

If Obama really believed that “respect for human rights is an antidote to instability and the grievances that fuel violence and terror,” wouldn’t he move to do something differently, something like renouncing — without waiting for Congress — the Authorization for the Use of Military Force that followed September 11? Wouldn’t he move to do something to show respect for human rights and international law, like joining the International Criminal Court or working to strengthen, instead of undermine, the United Nations?

The Afghanistan War Continues

Instead we now hear that the U.S. war in Afghanistan will go on for another two and a half years. How many more Afghans will die, be grievously wounded, be made refugees, by this occupation? How many more U.S. troops will come home with grave physical and psychological wounds? On the Real News I discussed why keeping U.S. troops in Afghanistan won’t solve the problems that country faces after almost three decades of war and occupation: If 100,000 U.S. troops and 30,000 NATO troops didn’t bring peace, stability, democracy, development, or any of the other things we promised, keeping 10,000 troops there won’t do it either.

And we should not forget that the special forces troops who remain will have only one military job: to kill those the U.S. (based on who-knows-what intelligence) identifies as bad guys. That’s why we’re almost certainly going to see access to military bases as part of the agreement with Afghanistan — to keep the drone war going, to kill more bad guys. No pretense that “protecting Afghans” is somehow on the U.S. agenda, just straight-up counter-terrorism, plus training the Afghan military to do the same thing. Not such a great prospect for Afghan civilians.

The Afghan elections — the final round of voting is scheduled very soon — are not likely to have much impact on the war, except that both of the leading candidates have indicated their willingness to sign off on a Bilateral Security Agreement allowing U.S. troops to remain. We’ll see whether they can convince their parliament to guarantee full immunity for U.S. troops for any war crimes they might commit — the refusal of which was what led to the full troop withdrawal from Iraq. Both candidates have also recruited notorious warlords as running mates in the interest of winning various ethnic votes. I’ve been talking about that, and what has and hasn’t changed in Afghanistan — you can watch The Real News interview or listen to my discussion on FAIR’s Counterspin show.

A few weeks ago I wrote about a Washington event where I joined Iraq Veterans Against the War and veterans’ families to call for “the right to heal” — challenging the Pentagon’s longstanding habit of sending back to active duty soldiers diagnosed with PTSD or other traumatic brain injuries. But they went beyond the demand for better health care for veterans — an issue that remains at the top of the political agenda despite the dismissal of Eric Shinseki as head of Veteran’s Affairs — to include the call for real accountability and support for health care as well as more for the victims of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

As our great congressional heroine Barbara Lee said last week, in response to President Obama’s announcement about keeping troops in Afghanistan through the end of 2016, “There is no military solution in Afghanistan.” That’s true now, and it will still be true in 2016. This just means 30 more months of U.S. war.

Syria: The War Still Expands

Syria’s multi-faceted civil war continues to expand, and conditions for Syrian civilians continue to deteriorate. In early May, the UN opened a new refugee camp for Syrians in Jordan with space for 130,000 people — 6,500 arrived just in the first month. When it reaches capacity — and unfortunately, it seems certain that it will — it will surpass the Zaatari camp in Jordan, already the second largest refugee camp in the world.

Reports of bombings, sieges, and killings continue. By May 29, the BBC reports that almost 3 million people have fled across Syria’s borders, one of the largest forced migrations since World War II. I talked about this humanitarian crisis and Syria’s six wars in the Real News. And after UN and Arab League special envoy Lakhdar Brahimi resigned in mid-May — in frustration with the world’s failure to do enough to stop the killing — I discussed the consequences of this decision for Syria on Al Jazeera.

So What Do We Do about Syria?

Of course it’s not enough to say the U.S. shouldn’t send missile strikes or arm one side of the civil war: We need a serious campaign to change U.S. policy towards Syria. Over the last several weeks, many of the leaders of national anti-war and peace and justice organizations have been meeting to figure out what our “ask” should be — what should we be demanding of our government? Out of these discussions, I wrote “5 Concrete Steps the US Can Take to End the Syria Crisis” for last week’s issue of The Nation.

Read it, add to it, use it as talking points for meeting with members of Congress, as the basis for letters to the editor, or as the beginning of new campaigns. We can’t allow Syria to slip away from our attention.

Good News with the Bad: Iran and Palestine

There is some good news, weirdly enough, on a couple of fronts not known for good tidings. On Iran, there are serious indications that the talks underway between Iran and the U.S. with its allies (known as the P-5 + 1, for the five permanent members of the UN Security Council plus Germany) are going reasonably well. The fact that we’re not hearing a lot of debate and opposition in the Congress is actually a good sign.

Following last February’s interim agreement, the talks are shaped around Iran’s nuclear power program on one side and ending sanctions and Iran being taken seriously as a regional power on the other. The current deadline is July 20, but the interim agreement allows for a six-month extension — and both sides have an interest in making an effort. President Obama is desperate for some kind of foreign policy success, and a bargain with Iran — grand or not — would give a huge boost to his claimed commitment to diplomacy over force (even if he still falsely claims that only sanctions brought Iran to the table.) President Rouhani is under significant public pressure to get U.S. and United Nations sanctions lifted, and he still faces political challenges from other factions of Iran’s powerful ruling circles.

(It must be mentioned, but it’s not all good news: the Washington Post, rarely supportive of diplomacy with Iran, took their usual editorial position warning that a deal was unlikely — but then went further, reassuring readers that if a deal were somehow reached there would be “a strong check on any concessions made by the Obama administration. If Congress or Israel are dissatisfied, they may be able to scuttle the deal.” Really? If another country — Israel is not part of the P-5 + 1 — is “dissatisfied,” it might have equal status with the U.S. Congress to “scuttle the deal?” I’m torn between being pleased that the Post felt compelled finally to admit that possibility, or outraged that as usual they appear to think it’s a good thing.)

In Palestine, the Pope Replaces the Peace Process

The other good news has to do, first, with the collapse of the U.S.-orchestrated “peace process” between Israel and Palestine. After 23 years of failed diplomacy and nine months of intensive John Kerry-led talks with and between Palestinians and Israelis, the latest “Einstein Round” ended unceremoniously. (I’ve been calling this the “Einstein Round” based on the great scientist’s definition of crazy: Doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result.)

The talks ended after Israel reneged on its earlier promise to release the last 29 of 104 prisoners, following that up with announcing its plans to build hundreds of new illegal settlement apartments. That’s all business-as-usual for Israeli occupation. The good news included the Palestinian response, which was to sign on to 15 human rights and other treaties and covenants, bringing Palestine into compliance with a wide range of international norms. What a contrast: Israel violates more agreements and more international laws, Palestinians respond with claiming international law as their own. And the U.S. responds that both sides have done unhelpful things. Great.

But, for a change, there was some good news when the White House and State Department made clear their view that, in fact, Israel was responsible for the talks’ collapse.

Kerry even used the term “apartheid” — and while he used it only in the sense of warning Israel that it could face a future as an apartheid state if it didn’t manage a two-state solution, rather than recognizing Israel today as an apartheid state — his very mention of the word reflected the change in U.S. discourse on the issue. As CNN reported it, “John Kerry wasn’t the first to use the A-word — apartheid — when talking about Israel, and he likely won’t be the last.” Of course his statement led to attacks and calls for Kerry’s resignation from Israel supporters in the U.S. and beyond, but there were no serious political consequences.

Discourse shifts are never enough, though. On the ground things have not changed for most Palestinians. Two young boys, 15-year-old Muhammad Abu Thahr and 17-year-old Nadim Nuwara, were killed by Israeli soldiers firing live ammunition at a protest outside Israel’s Ofer Prison in the occupied West Bank on May 15, Nakba Day, the day Palestinians commemorate their massive dispossession that accompanied the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. They were only the latest casualties of the occupation.

There is some cause for optimism regarding the Palestinian unity process that may result in a new technocratic government of national unity for the Palestinian Authority supported by both main factions, Fatah (that controls the PA in the West Bank) and Hamas (running the authority in Gaza.) It isn’t yet a full unity process — it remains unclear how Palestinians living inside Israel and the millions of Palestinian refugees scattered in far-flung exile will be included — but if it succeeds it represents a major step forward.

And then, finally, we had the Pope. Pope Francis went to Palestine and Israel, and — as we’ve seen so many times already in his shifting the church’s focus to the poor and dispossessed — here he made clear that he was not, as his predecessors have been, interested only in strengthening the Vatican’s ties to Israel. This time, it was all about the visuals — and that meant the extraordinary photograph of the Pope praying and leaning his head against the Apartheid Wall in Bethlehem splashed across the front pages of newspapers around the world.

I talked about it on The Real News and wrote about it for FPIF and The Nation last week — and since the Pope went to lay a wreath at his tomb, I got to include my favorite quote from Theodor Herzl, the founder of modern Zionism. It’s the one from his letter to the infamous Cecil Rhodes (who conquered much of Africa for the British Crown) in which Herzl begs Rhodes to join his project for a European Jewish state in Palestine because it is “something colonial.”

IPS’ recent report, “The One Percent at State U” examines the 25 state universities that paid out the most in executive compensation from 2005 to 2012, and found that executive pay at these schools reached an average of nearly $1 million by 2012 while student debt and low-wage faculty rose much faster than national averages.

“Why should students and faculty — and everyone who cares about them — pay close attention to the upward spiral of such salaries?” asked report authors Marjorie Wood and Andrew Erwin in their Los Angeles Times op-ed. “Because according to our research, these highest-paid presidents are more likely to preside over public universities where student debt is growing fastest and the number of full-time faculty is shrinking.”

The report also resulted in a New York Times editorial on May 23, 2014. Using the report’s findings, the Editorial Board concluded: “Confronted with punishing state budget cuts, the public colleges and universities that educate more than 70 percent of this country’s students have raised tuition, shrunk course offerings and hired miserably paid, part-time instructors who now form what amounts to a new underclass in the academic hierarchy. At the same time, some of those colleges and universities are spending much too freely on their top administrators.”

The report and an infographic of its findings have also become important resources to organizations working to eliminate inequality in higher education institutions, including SEIU’s Adjunct Action Campaign, the New Faculty Majority, the Lecturers’ Employee Organization, Jobs with Justice, and the Student Labor Action Project.

Emira Woods has guided IPS to prominence on issues connected to Africa and the Global South.

I write to share with you news about an important transition happening at the Institute for Policy Studies.

Emira Woods, Co-Director of Foreign Policy In Focus at IPS since 2003 and a treasured leader in the movement for global justice, is transitioning her role at the end of May. Emira will be taking a position as Global Client Principal for Social Impact Programs at ThoughtWorks, a technology firm committed to social and economic justice. Emira will maintain an ongoing relationship with IPS as an Associate Fellow.

A steadfast advocate for the African world, labor rights, environmental justice, land rights, food sovereignty, and peace, Emira has led IPS to international prominence during her 11 years as Co-Director of FPIF.

Emira has been instrumental in bringing forward a legal suit and a campaign against Firestone for their abuse of child labor and the environment in Liberia. She effectively lobbied the U.S. Department of Labor for Liberia’s rubber sector to be added to the list of countries with materials produced by child labor, and was also pivotal to the campaign to cancel over $4 billion of odious debt after Liberia’s 26-year war.

Emira led the campaign against the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) and succeeded in reducing Congressional appropriations and increasing oversight. She testified as an expert witness for Congressional hearings on global debt and development as well as peace and security in Africa. She also briefed Congress’ Lantos Human Rights Commission on Zimbabwe and Cote D’Ivoire. She organized Congressional briefings on child labor, conflict diamonds, conflict in the Democratic Republic of Congo, human rights in Zimbabwe, private military contractors, and other issues. Emira also served as technical adviser to the African Union’s Diaspora Summit and provided strategic technical advice to the governments of Liberia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on “vulture funds” and broader issues of debt cancellation.

Serving as an accomplished pubic scholar, Emira has written book chapters, op-eds, and magazine articles on a range of issues from debt, trade and development to U.S. military policy. She has been a regular commentator on PBS’s NewsHour, CNN’s Your World Today, BBC’s The World Today (Weekend), National Public Radio, Al Jazeera and Voice of America. She has hosted a WashingtonPost.com online chat and published pieces in BBC’s Focus on Africa magazine, NAACP’s Crisis magazine as well as the Miami Herald, the Christian Science Monitor, New York Newsday, the Nation, the Baltimore Sun, and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, among many others. She was listed in Essence magazine’s “Top 40 Influential People Under 40.”

Emira served as visiting lecturer at American University School of International Service, Trinity College Economics Department, and Howard University’s African Studies Department. She also frequently represented IPS as a speaker at conferences and events.

During her tenure, Emira has provided strong, principled leadership at the Institute and in the broader progressive community. She has convened and coordinated numerous advocacy coalitions on Africa and other issues. One of her many strengths has always been “speaking truth to power,” which she has done passionately from the White House and U.S. Congress to Southern governments and intergovernmental agencies — and done it all with a smile.

We are pleased to continue Emira’s affiliation with the Institute, and we look forward to working with her in her new capacity at ThoughtWorks.

My friend Brian — who uses a mobility device to move around — can today gain access to more stores than a mobility-impaired person could two decades ago. Thanks to social movements and federal policy changes, many public locations are now required to make their entrances more accessible to those with disabilities.

The thing is though, while Brian now has an easier time getting into the stores themselves, he can’t always afford the things that he needs once he gets inside.

When Congress passed the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, it was certainly a step forward in ending discrimination against people with disabilities. Yet, it was not enough to combat the disproportionate poverty and joblessness that people with disabilities experience: In 2011, the poverty rate of working-age people with disabilities — 10.5 percent of the U.S. population — was over twice that of those without disabilities. Two-thirds of that 10.5 percent were also unemployed.

Social welfare programs like Medicaid are meant to help address and alleviate this sort of discrimination — approximately 70 percent of Medicaid funding has been used for services and supports related to disability since the program’s inception. This funding is particularly important, since many people with disabilities face additional costs that others do not, such as expensive monthly medication, long-term services and care, or special equipment.

However, an increasing number of people in poverty who have disabilities will not receive care from social services because their state will not accept Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act (ACA). While the ACA’s new definitions will be qualifying more people for Medicaid, there will be constraints on who actually receives those benefits if its funding is not expanded.

Mississippi, one of the poorest states in the country, is among those that have not accepted Medicaid expansion. Because Governor Phil Bryant turned down approximately $426 million in federal Medicaid expansion funds, nearly 300,000 adults in the state will not get healthcare because they do not qualify for Medicaid under the state’s current rules and do not make enough to afford private insurance.

My friend Brian, who struggled to find an affordable health insurance plan, was lucky to live in Illinois — now that he qualifies for Medicaid thanks to the expansion that Governor Pat Quinn has accepted, he can now actually afford the goods he needs. If only more states accepted Medicaid expansion, others like Brian could have access to a more equitable standard of living.

Fortune 500 company is seeking a highly unproductive senior accountant to help inflate the cost of complying with a new federal law requiring that all publicly held corporations disclose the ratio between their CEO and median worker pay.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce, a long-time opponent of CEO-worker pay ratio disclosure, has just gone on record estimating that making this ratio calculation will force American businesses to expend a total of $710.9 million per year. For large companies, the Chamber reports, calculating a CEO-worker pay ratio will take an average of 1,825 number-crunching hours at an average cost of $311,800.

Unfortunately, the Chamber’s projections have elicited widespread ridicule from independent observers. Given this ridicule, it is imperative that corporations like ours demonstrate that calculating a CEO-worker pay ratio will take the maximum possible amount of time and cost.

Successful candidates for our new accounting position must have a track record of delivering slow and expensive work in difficult circumstances. In this case, these circumstances include:

Limited scope: The accountant responsible for calculating our CEO-median worker pay ratio does not have to bother calculating our CEO pay, since all publicly held corporations already must report their executive compensation. This work only involves calculating median worker pay.

Flexible methodology: Under the proposed Securities and Exchange rule prepared to enforce the new disclosure mandate, companies like ours need only base their median worker pay figure on a sampling of our workforce.

Qualifications:

Advanced degree in Accounting/Finance.

The ability to produce inaccurate analyses in a less than timely manner.

Self-starters and individuals with excellent multi-tasking skills need not apply.

Salary and Benefits:Salary is flexible. To exceed the Chamber of Commerce average, we’ll need to spend more than $311,800 to calculate this number, the equivalent of at least $650 an hour for six months of work. Benefits include generous vacation/unexplained leave time and nap room.

The civil war in Syria grinds on, and conditions for Syrian civilians—those inside its borders as well as the millions forced to flee to neighboring countries—continue to deteriorate. As global and regional powers not only fail to help end the war but actively engage in arming and funding all sides in the fighting, we in civil society must sharpen our demands for a different position from that of our governments.

The crisis began with a popular call for an end to repression and a nonviolent movement demanding accountability from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government and the release of political prisoners and detainees. Economic and environmental traumas, including a crippling drought and the slashing of key government subsidies, underpinned the crisis. The government responded with a promise of reform—which went unfulfilled—accompanied by terrible violence. Many Syrian activists and defecting soldiers took up weapons in response, and as the fighting spread, Islamists—many of them non-Syrian extremists—joined the anti-government battle. Three years on, the civil war has broadened into several overlapping but distinct wars, national, regional, sectarian and international.

We must stand with those struggling for equality, dignity and human rights for all Syrians, and on the principle that there is no military solution to the conflict. Further military action will increase the violence and instability, not only inside Syria but within the region and even globally—and will not improve the lives of Syria’s beleaguered civilians.

A wind farm outside Cape Town, South Africa. A new African energy initiative in the U.S. Congress promotes an appropriate mix of power solutions in Africa, but it leaves the door wide open to fossil fuels. (warrenski/Flickr)

This week, the House will vote on the Electrify Africa Act. This bill directs the president to draw up a multi-year strategy to strengthen the ability of countries in sub-Saharan Africa to “develop an appropriate mix of power solutions” to provide electricity, fight poverty, and “drive economic growth.”

Because of strong pressure from climate justice advocates, some positives—such as integrated resource planning and decentralized renewable energy—are named as a part of that mix. But because it still leaves the door wide open to fossil fuels, the bill doesn’t go far enough to protect people or their environment.

And the debate over Electrify Africa continues as the Senate drafts a companion bill.

Powering Fossil Fuels

Behind both pieces of legislation is a White House initiative announced last summer called “Power Africa.” It frames President Barack Obama’s approach to energy investment on the continent, which has been condemned by environmental justice groups. It’s an “all of the above” energy strategy that favors the fossil fuel companies that are destroying the planet and corrupting Washington.

Proponents of Electrify and Power Africa have been most publicly enthusiastic about new discoveries of vast reserves of oil and gas on the continent, which has many African activists wary of a resource grab. Executives from companies like General Electric—which according to Forbes has recently pivoted its attention to the continent—have appeared on the podium with President Obama to applaud the policy.

At a March Senate hearing on Power Africa, Del Renigar, Senior Counsel for Global Government Affairs and Policy at GE, even noted that one of the company’s “most significant efforts to date has been focused on the privatization of the Nigerian power sector.” He lauded the potential of Power Africa to help “reduce the obstacles” to negotiating deals for power projects. And some backers of dirty energy are attempting to use the initiative to weaken the existing environmental safeguard policies of national development finance institutions such as the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC).

The backers of keeping dirty energy in Power Africa like to portray their opponents as privileged elites who want to keep Africans “in the dark” by denying them electricity and industrialization, while keeping their own lights on.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The real concern here is that U.S. taxpayers will wind up supporting African energy development that caters to corporate industrial zones and natural resource exporters, leaving the majority of Africans in rural and neglected urban areas still without access to power and exposed to dangerous pollution.

An OPIC proposal to finance the Azura Edo gas plant in Nigeria is a recent case in point. Areview of project documents and site visits by Environmental Rights Action Nigeria found that the plant will not provide any new energy access, even to villages immediately adjacent to the project, nor will families displaced by the project receive adequate resettlement compensation. Project developers did not consider any renewable energy options. Instead, the plant will use open-cycle gas turbines supplied by GE—a technology more polluting and less energy efficient than closed-cycle turbines. Yet this project is considered part of Power Africa.

A Global Climate Justice Movement

In Africa, the United States, and around the world, there is a growing outcry against the ravages of coal and other fossil fuel pollution, which sickens and kills—with the burden falling hardest on the poor, elderly, and children.

A climate justice movement with a clear vision for a clean, equitable energy future is making itself heard. The drivers of this movement are people living on the front line of dirty energy in poorer countries and in low-income neighborhoods in wealthier nations like the United States. They understand firsthand the effects of dirty energy pollution and climate chaos, and are champions of innovative forms of clean rural and urban electrification—not only in the Global South, but just as urgently in the heavily polluting Global North. In fact, an international campaign to demand climate justice, representing over 100 groups in developing and developed countries, has called for efforts to ensure “people’s access to clean, safe, and renewable energy sources.”

In Africa, climate justice activists are speaking eloquently about a new economy for Africans and everyone else that leapfrogs fossil fuels and delivers electricity to hundreds of millions of people through clean energy and energy efficiency.

Augustine Njamnshi, Policy Coordinator of the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance in Cameroon, asserts that “the transition must be just as much as it must be swift. There must be clear measures to ensure ‘climate jobs’ are created—jobs and livelihoods that are necessary for the shift to low carbon, climate resilient, and equitable development pathways.” Innovation abounds in these areas, but policy incentives still tend to favor fossil fuels over clean energy.

Another dynamic group, Earthlife Africa, is opposing coal-fired plants in South Africa, which they argue will create far more environmental problems than energy benefits. Like most environmental justice groups, Earthlife couples that opposition with bold proposals for an alternative energy future. They are promoting studies about the job benefits of a renewable energy strategy. And they argue that, with the right policies, 50 percent of all South African electricity could come from renewable sources by 2050.

African climate justice groups have documented how large-scale energy projects tend to serve big corporations and the wealthy. According to the South Africa-based NGO Groundwork, residents pay up to seven times more for their electricity in that country than major corporations do. Meanwhile, pollution from the country’s dirty energy system results in massive health costs to the state.

The climate justice movement also points out that those most responsible for the problem should be the ones to help pay for real solutions. And that means divesting from dirty-energy corporations and investing in renewable energy systems that put people first. Desmond Tutu, South African social rights activist and retired Anglican bishop, recently wrote that “people of conscience need to break their ties with corporationsfinancing the injustice of climate change.”

The U.S. Congress and the White House would both do well to heed his call and allocate resources to contribute to the energy revolution that Africa and the United States so desperately need. It’s not a fossil fuel revolution, but instead one rooted in clean alternatives that come from the remarkable innovations of people working together.

On the same day that the federal government released its National Climate Assessment which summarizes the impacts of climate change on the United States, Stanford University trustees voted to divest their $18.7 billion endowment of coal stocks, the largest in a growing group of funds to partially divest from fossil fuels.

The message in the National Climate Assessment was clear: Climate change is upon us and it has already dramatically transformed our national landscape along with our weather. The time for delay on action is over.

The message from Stanford students was equally clear: It’s time for universities to act and divest from all fossil fuels. “Fossil Free Stanford, along with over 400 student campaigns across the country, maintains the goal of divesting from all fossil fuels,” the students wrote in their online statement. “Stanford’s coal divestment alone will not be enough turn the tide on climate change. We call on university administrators across the nation to follow Stanford’s lead and begin the process of divestment.”

Stanford students have worked for several years to build student, faculty and trustee support for an effort to divest their endowment of all fossil fuels. While Stanford has taken the first step in purging its investments of coal stocks, Deborah DeCotis, the Stanford trustee who chairs the investment responsibility committee, conceded that this was not the only step the university was prepared to take: “This is not the ending point. It’s a process. We’re a research institute, and as the technology develops to make other forms of alternative energy sources available, we will continue to review and make decisions about things we should not be invested in. Don’t interpret this as a pass on other things.”

The determination of Stanford students to divest their university from fossil fuels echoes some work several of us at the Institute for Policy Studies launched together with other groups in 1997, when we began to urge the World Bank to divest from all fossil fuels.

Last year, the World Bank issued its own report on climate change, “Turn Down the Heat,” which warned that the planet is on track for a four-degree Celsius temperature rise by 2100. Along with many scientists, the Bank fears that such an increase would be incompatible with civilization as we know it. At the very least, rapid global warming — and the storms, droughts and other extreme weather it would unleash — would render the bank’s mission of alleviating poverty and fostering sustainable development impossible.

It is surprising it took them this long to come to this conclusion. It was in 1992, at the Rio Earth Summit, when the scientific community warned that a climate crisis was imminent, that the World Bank was charged with the task of marshaling the funds to address the emergency. But instead, over the next two decades, the Bank invested roughly $48.8 billion — not in clean energy, but in dirty fossil fuel projects in the developing world. Over the same time period, the Global Environmental Facility, housed at the Bank, invested only $3.5 billion in climate change mitigation projects.

In 2005, our researchers calculated that from 1992 to 2004, the World Bank had financed fossil fuel projects around the world that would release the equivalent of almost two years’ worth of global greenhouse gas emissions over their lifetimes. Our research found that virtually none of this financing would meet the energy needs of the planet’s poorest two billion people, nearly all of whom lived without access to electricity. Instead, the projects would power export-oriented heavy industry and urban areas — and bolster the bank accounts of wealthy corporations like Exxon and Halliburton.

Pressured to conduct its own review, the Bank issued a 2004 report that showed that the global poor were actually harmed by the Bank’s fossil fuel investments. The 2004 report further urged the Bank to stop financing coal immediately, to get out of oil by 2008, and to rapidly ramp up its investments in renewable energy sources. The Bank’s Board of Directors voted to ignore these recommendations, with the exception of setting modest targets for renewable energy lending.

Fast forward to June 2013, when President Obama made a major announcement on climate action in Georgetown, stating that public financing of coal — such as financing via agencies like the Export-Import Bank of the United States (Ex-Im Bank) — should end.

We were the first organization, together with Friends of the Earth, to document the significant climate impacts of the Ex-Im Bank and Overseas Private Investment Corporation’s fossil fuel investments in 1998. That research resulted in a lawsuit filed by Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, and the City of Boulder challenging both of those public financial institutions with violations under the National Environmental Protection Act, for not calculating the cumulative emissions of their projects on global climate. Obama’s statement took that research and legal action one step further and called for an end to almost all U.S. government funding of coal overseas. The White House statement said:

“…The President calls for an end to U.S. government support for public financing of new coal plants overseas, except for (a) the most efficient coal technology available in the world’s poorest countries in cases where no other economically feasible alternative exists, or (b) facilities deploying carbon capture and sequestration technologies. As part of this new commitment, we will work actively to secure the agreement of other countries and the multilateral development banks to adopt similar policies as soon as possible.”

Shortly after Obama made this statement, other international financial institutions followed suit: First the World Bank, then the Ex-Im Bank rejected a coal burner in Vietnam; the European Investment Bank pledged to get out of most forms of coal; and then the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development followed along with the Nordic countries and the United Kingdom.

The recognition by all of these banks, and now by some university trustees, is abundantly clear: Coal is part of a bygone era. Coal kills, and — in an era of rapidly warming temperatures — it is time to seek other energy alternatives. But divesting from coal is not enough: These banks and universities must divest from all fossil fuels.

Thankfully, the tide is turning. And hopefully it will turn more rapidly than our own tides will rise.